The world at a glance
Washington DC
Judge told to step down: Democrats are demanding that supreme court justice Clarence Thomas recuse himself from all cases relating to the 2020 election and the storming of the Capitol, because text messages sent by his wife after the election have snared him in an acute conflict of interest. In the messages – leaked to The Washington Post – Virginia Thomas implores Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to keep up the fight to overturn the election result. Expose “the obvious fraud”, and “the whole coup” that has stolen Trump’s victory, she urges. “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!! The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.” Clarence Thomas (pictured with his wife) was the only one of the nine supreme court judges to back Trump’s attempt to prevent the examination of his White House records by the committee investigating the Capitol riot. Some Democrats, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are calling for Thomas’s resignation.
Washington DC
Still smarting: Donald Trump has filed a 108-page lawsuit accusing Hillary Clinton – and several others – of trying to derail his 2016 election campaign by falsely linking him to Russia. The former president is seeking at least $24m in costs and damages. Other defendants include the then-FBI director, James Comey; Christopher Steele, the British ex-spy who compiled a dossier on Trump’s alleged Russian links; and several Democratic Party campaign aides. According to the suit, “Hillary Clinton and her cohorts orchestrated an unthinkable plot… that shocks the conscience and is an affront to this nation’s democracy. Defendants maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that… Donald J. Trump was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty.” Clinton has dismissed the lawsuit as “nonsense”.
San Salvador
Gang murders: The murder of 87 people in gang-related killings last weekend has led El Salvador’s parliament to approve a 30-day state of emergency – giving the state powers to restrict public gatherings, make arrests without a warrant and intercept private communications. On Saturday alone, 62 people were killed, making it the most deadly such day in El Salvador since the end of the civil war in 1992. Five leaders of the MS-13 gang have been arrested. “While we fight criminals in the streets, we must try to figure out what is happening and who is financing this,” said President Nayib Bukele (pictured). The US treasury department, however, claims that Bukele’s government has secretly negotiated de facto “truces” with some gangs, buying their support with financial benefits and privileges for their imprisoned members.
Managua
Diplomat condemns his president: Nicaragua’s ambassador to the Organisation of American States, the international body comprising nations across the Americas, has dramatically turned on his own government – condemning it as a “dictatorship” and urging fellow Nicaraguans to “lose fear, not hope”. In a video address to the OAS permanent council last week, Arturo McFields announced he could no longer defend the “indefensible” record of President Daniel Ortega’s government, which has stepped up its authoritarian suppression of dissent over the past year by jailing dozens of opponents. The last straw, he said, was the eight-year jail sentence imposed last week on presidential hopeful Cristiana Chamorro. “I have to speak out, even though my future and that of my family is uncertain,” McFields told the meeting.
Washington DC
Taxing the rich: President Joe Biden has put forward a controversial tax measure – dubbed a “billionaire minimum-income tax” – as a key plank of his 2023 budget proposals. Its aim is to ensure that households worth more than $100m (0.01% of the total) pay at least 20% in taxes on both income and on “unrealised gains”. This means they would pay tax on the annual increase in market value of their investments, even if they’ve kept those investments in their portfolios – the payment can then be deducted from the tax due when the investments are sold. The wealth of the super-rich shot up in the pandemic, mostly owing to soaring share prices – last year, the country’s 700 or so billionaires each saw their wealth rise by $1.4bn on average. Yet decades of tax cuts and exemptions for the rich meant many ended up paying a lower tax rate than ordinary Americans. The measure, if it gets through Congress, is expected to raise more than $360bn over ten years.
Parima, Venezuela
Deaths in the rainforest: Four members of an Amazonian tribe were shot dead by Venezuelan soldiers last week in a confrontation over access to the internet. The Yanomami people, who inhabit 18 million hectares of rainforest on both sides of the Brazilian border, first came into sustained contact with outsiders in the 1940s; today they number around 38,000. In recent years, Yanomami living close to a military airbase in a region known as Parima B had been allowed to use its Wi-Fi connection for the purpose of alerting the authorities to illegal gold mining on their land. But new personnel at the base cut the connection, and when tribespeople went to complain, they were refused access to the new password – causing a confrontation that turned violent.